The technical paradox of light glinting out of darkness is thus formally enacted in these works, an irony extended thematically in the subjects of her black-on-black series, “Kings” (1998).  As a medium, it is even more appropriate to the themes of this current exhibition:  scant light in a dark time, the heroism of a few non-Jews in saving their Jewish compatriots in Denmark and Bulgaria.  For it is a heroism which has built into it a paradoxical ambivalence toward such acts.

According to historian Leo Goldberger, in his recollection of his own rescue from Denmark as a child, two Danes knelt at the edge of the water in thankful prayer as his boat left the quay.  In Gunderson’s drawing of this moment, these two figures on the shore appear small and forlorn, and are almost obscured by the chop of waves.  In the four directional drawings, we see what the artist imagined the rescued and rescuers saw:  an endless expanse of moonlit seas and vast, black heavens, empty save for the same constellations of stars that guided their boats to Sweden’s shores.  Here the artist captures what is often lost in retrospective depictions of such events:  the palpable sense of isolation and danger experienced at the time by both the Jews and the Danish fishermen ferrying them through the night.  At the time of the operation, it was not yet a rescue¾but an extremely painful and forced abandonment of home and friends, a dangerous foray into the unknown.

Indeed, ambivalence remains animate in these images for other reasons, as well.  On the one hand, the stories of the Danes’ rescue of their Jews during World War II that Karen Gunderson heard as she grew up in a Danish American community in Racine, Wisconsin stirred great pride in her young heart.  It was no doubt a relief to know she was descended from the righteous and not from the killers or bystanders.  But as she grew into a more complex world of shadows and grey, the darker side of this rescue also began to dawn on her:  for it showed just what could have been done but was not done for nearly 6 million other European Jews during the war.  The rescue belied the self-exculpating myth of bystanders that “there was nothing we could do” or that “we didn’t know.”  In a terrible way, therefore, such rescues had to be celebrated and mourned at the same time.